Shaw’s War by Antony Melville Ross

SAS officer Harry Shaw is a man with a lethal mission and a master of the essential elements in a successful undercover operation – stealth, surprise and the stomach to kill quietly and mercilessly.

Disillusioned by the war of attrition in Ulster, he leaves the SAS and decides to ‘take out’ on his own the money men, the ringleaders of the American organisation NORAID who supply funds – blood money, as Shaw sees it – to the IRA.

To raise the finance for his operation, Shaw has to become a mercenary. Planning to exploit the situation to his own advantage, he embroils himself and his friend and former NCO, Bill Townsend, in the conflict in the Middle East. The funds he channels into his own private war as he pursues his quarry ruthlessly from the ‘bandit country’ of South Armagh to the concrete jungle of New York.

A spate of terrorist attacks launched by Shaw forces America and NORAID to take notice of his demands. But when the CIA, the SAS and finally the IRA start putting the pieces together Shaw’s war starts to turn very ugly indeed.

Shaw’s War is a sparkling, highly topical, technically inventive thriller – the story of one man’s attempt to take terrorism to the streets of New York.

Anthony Melville-Ross was born in Hastings, East Sussex on November 11 1920. He published six novels between 1978 and 1985, all inspired by his background as a sub-mariner in the Second World War. He had an extremely successful career in the navy, rose to command his own boat and transferred into the Secret Service after the end of the war. He died in his hometown on January 10 1993, aged 73.